Method Jdotb has answered more questions in our second Q&A session, Jdotb gives advice for this week's Mythic+ affixes on live servers and Blizzard has released a blog detailing the dungeons, keystone levels and affixes for the next step of the Mythic Dungeon Invitational.

Method Jdotb Q&A #2

Want to ask Jdotb a question? Leave a comment below and we'll pick some questions for Jdotb to answer in the next Q&A!

Jdotb plays a Resto Druid and will be participating on the Method NA team in the Mythic Dungeon Invitational. He has achieved multiple World Firsts and currently holds many of the top times in the NA Region. He frequently streams his Resto Druid gameplay. Find him here:

Given the nature of M+ and the need for people to collect various gear sets and pieces of equipment, what would you say are the generic "must-have" trinkets of the tier (and previous tiers) that make healing and being healed in M+ a breeze?

Legion hasn't been a great expansion for healers in terms of trinket choice. Most of the healing trinkets from M+ are useless at any ilvl, and raid trinkets from the first half of Legion weren't much better. Tomba di Sargeras finally introduced some useable healing trinkets, and luckily Antorus is loaded with them.

You can ignore all the healing trinkets that drop from Emerald Nightmare, Trial of Valor and Nighthold almost regardless of their ilvl. There is a tank trinket from Nighthold -- the Impugnatura di Pugnale Reale -- that has seen some situational use in M+ because it gives you a cheat death effect every 6 minutes. But unless you've gotten one that forged, the damage cap on it is likely too low to be useful these days.

Visione di Velen: The default trinket for a lot of M+ content. Velen's gives you a relatively short throughput cooldown that can either be used to increase all healing or to funnel healing into one or two players (like if the tank is about to get pounded). The stats on it are great as well. If you have some high ilvl raid trinkets you might think about dropping Velen's, but it's a strong contender for most classes.

Arcanocristallo Instabile: An oldie but a goodie. Arcanocrystal has been a monster since Day 1 of Legion, and it's good for most classes in the game. There isn't anything fancy about it; it's just a really big stat stick. If you can get one of these off the Relinquished vendor at 910 ilvl or higher, it'll likely be competitive with everything up to mythic Antorus trinkets.

Macchinazione del Sommo Padre: Highfather's is strong for a couple reasons: its effect heals quite a bit, and its effect heals quite a bit when you need it. There are a lot of fights in M+ where you will sit at full health for stretches of time and then suddenly need a lot of healing in a short window, and Highfather's does a great job of catching you up quickly.

Condotto di Retroazione dei Garothi: There isn't anything particularly special about the Conduit] -- it's mostly just a haste stat stick with a little RNG thrown in. Haste stat sticks are still nice though, and the Conduit has some added value because it's also useful for DPS on fights where the healing is light.

Emettitore del Vilscudo di Ishkar: Emitter is a niche trinket but very good in specific circumstances. It won't do much throughput on a fight, but if someone in your party is at risk of dying to a mechanic before you can heal them, Emitter is literally a lifesaver. On fights like Xavius or Hyrja where mechanics are liable to one-shot people at any moment, Emitter is the equivalent of a one minute external cooldown. DPS and tanks can also use Emitter though it will halve the effectiveness of the shield -- even then it can still be worth using for them.

Compassione di Eonar: Eonar's isn't a good fit for M+ in terms of what it does, but if you've got one at 1000 ilvl it might be your best option simply because of scaling. Once you get heroic or better versions of the trinkets above, you can probably drop Eonar's.

Grande Piano dell'Ingannatore: DGD is an interesting trinket for M+. The HoT you place on a teammate is often irrelevant for healing purposes, and you're literally only using it for the shield that procs when the target drops below 35%. It's very useful for quick chunk damage like Xavius' Consumo dei Deboli or Corstilax's Protocollo di Soppressione, but totally worthless if your teammate gets killed from above 35% health -- the shield will just never proc in that scenario.

Guardia Titanica Ardente: Not a healing trinket per se but a fantastic option as a sort of quasi-immunity. Titanguard will let you survive at least 10 million more damage from an ability making it very valuable on fights like Amalgama di Anime or Lord Kur'Talos.

Residuo del Pozzo Oscuro Coagulato: A handy tank trinket from Arcway. It can be hard to get one of these since you'll need to have a tank spec to even put it on the loot table. Residue has a very short cooldown making it ideal for surviving things that would only slightly overkill you.

With the rising interest in mythic+, and how the world first raiding race is really only 1-2 guilds, do you ever see mythic+ overtaking the vast majority of players' focus within the game, even on new tier releases?

Let's pump the brakes a bit on the “death of raiding” narrative that seems to have been attached to Battle for Azeroth. I'm certainly not a big fan of raiding, but even I can appreciate some of the things it brings to the table.

For starters, raiding is often the cornerstone of a guild, and guilds are the cornerstone of WoW. How many people still play WoW for no reason other than wanting to see their friends a few nights a week while they progress on bosses? It can be incredibly frustrating trying to manage a roster of 20+ players, but raids are unique in their ability to really feel like a family. You won't be close to everyone in your raid, but the camaraderie you build by spending 10-15 hours a week with the same group is tough to replicate in any other activity.

Raids also have historically been the drivers of lore in WoW. Dungeons will often have their own little stories to tell and might even tie back in to a larger narrative arc in the game, but usually the expansion moves forward at the pace of raids. For casual players that are as much interested in the world of Azeroth as they are about grinding out content for hours at a time, raids are where the magic happens. Unless Blizzard switches up its approach to storytelling, raids will be must-see content for all players.

Which is all to say that raids aren't going anywhere but not necessarily that raids will continue to be the premiere PvE content going forward. M+ is a great format for a number of reasons: it's shorter, it requires less people, it gives loot every time, and you can make it exactly as challenging as you want it. Raiding, especially mythic raiding, is as close to a job as you can get in video games these days. You have to commit to a weekly schedule, you have to constantly recruit to fill vacancies, and you have to organize a loot system to fairly distribute rewards. No M+ group has ever had officers because you don't need officers to manage a 5 person group. You can grab four friends and be done with a M+ run in 30 minutes where even a normal raid can take two or three hours. And there are no lockouts on M+ so you always have a potential upgrade waiting at the end of the dungeon.

If you started WoW from scratch today and had to pick whether M+ or raiding looked like the better and more sustainable PvE format, I think M+ is hands down the winner. I'd be surprised if BfA doesn't lean heavily on M+. But hoping that raiding takes a back seat to M+ any time soon is a pipedream.

Is it always better to let the tank ask for your external, or should you ever just use it because you feel it's a good time?

This depends heavily on your group dynamic.

Are you pugging with a tank you've never seen before? It's a pretty solid bet they won't even respond to a “hello” in party chat let alone tell you they'll be needing Pelle di Legnoduro for Ymiron's next Fendente Oscuro.

If it's the tank you've been running 80% of your dungeons with for the last four months, you should always wait for them to call for the external unless you've repeatedly asked them to call for externals and they just refuse to do so. Good tanks will always plan a cooldown rotation in their head to survive a big trash pull or a boss, and using an external on them without saying something first is probably just going to lead to an unnecessary overlap in mitigation.

There is certainly the possibility that your tank needs your external to live through something and just never calls for it. That's either because the tank didn't realize they were going to die (bad) or because your tank think it's less of a hassle to die than it is to talk in Discord (worse). If you find yourself in this situation frequently with a tank, you should probably focus more on finding a new tank than on how you can fix it. I know tanks can be hard to come by, but there are certain minimum requirements that come with the job.

Making other people ask for your external is obviously a chore but it's the only way to use externals effectively.

What are the qualities that a good tank can have to make the healers job easier?

The tank-healer dynamic in a group is special and unique. If the two of you aren't on the same page, the dungeon will rarely go well. There isn't a one-size-fits-all way for the tank and healer to work together, but there are a few things every tank can do to help his or her healer out.

The first is communication. This is true of all party members but especially for the tank. Tanks will be the ones to choose what trash packs to pull in what order, and letting your team know what's coming is helpful for switching gear or preparing cooldown usage. Tanks are also an ideal candidate for coordinating crowd control and interrupts. On lower keys, overlapping stuns or kicking the same target simultaneously isn't a big deal. On higher keys, those kinds of mistakes will wipe the group when you run out of ways to stop an enraged Thundercaller from one-shotting your party members.

The second is self-healing. Most tanks in Legion have ample ways to keep themselves healed in low-to-moderate damage situations (sorry Brewmasters). If the healer is confident that the tank knows how to use mitigation and self-healing appropriately, it frees the healer up to help with damage. This is a topic near and dear to my heart, and anyone that has watched my stream for more than five minutes knows that I'll let Shakib sit at 40% hp for an entire pull because I know he can take care of himself. This goes both ways, too -- if a healer constantly spams heals on the tank, the tank may never have an opportunity to really show off their full kit of survival abilities. There are a lot of trash pulls and bosses where my tank will outheal me because they don't need me. Don't feel bad about that as a healer; look at it as an opportunity to contribute in other ways.

Lastly, tanks more than any other party member need to know the dungeon inside and out. Does this trash pack have mobs that cleave melee? Better face them away from the group. Is it safe to pull these three packs together or does that require more interrupts than our group has? Where should I stand during this boss fight so I can round up the adds as quickly as possible when they spawn? It helps if everyone knows what's going on, but if we're being honest you can frequently skate in a dungeon as a DPS or healer without being totally aware of all the mechanics. That's a lot harder for a tank.

Mostly, though, if you're asking yourself what you can do as a tank to make things easier for your healer, you're already on the path to becoming a good tank.

How can a new person learn when to use cooldowns?

You can always watch streams and VODs of people that play your class and try to mimic what they do. This can be helpful to try to understand their decisionmaking, and eventually you'll start to pick up on the rules of thumb they're using.

But the real answer, as unsexy as it is, is trial and error. I'm still learning how to use my cooldowns, and I'll be learning how to use my cooldowns for as long as I play WoW. The introduction of M+ has really hammered this point home for me because the things that worked in a +5 won't always work in a +10, and the things that worked in a +10 won't always work in a +15.

WoW is often a game of “good enough”. You learn how to heal good enough to survive a certain boss. You learn how to DPS good enough to kill trash before you run out of crowd control. You tank good enough to stay alive for four minutes on Hyrja. But as you keep cranking up the level of your keys, “good enough” stops being good enough. And then you have to figure out how to get better.

I've probably healed Melandrus in Corte delle Stelle with six different pairs of legendaries as I've gone from M0s to +27. Eventually Melandrus does more damage than I can heal, and I go back to the drawing board. I try different trinkets, I try different combinations of healing cooldowns and externals, and I pay attention to which DPS classes need more and less help from me.

For now, I'm pretty confident that I can heal Melandrus “good enough”. But maybe we get that juicy +29 Corte delle Stelle key and everyone dies on the fourth Maelstrom Tagliente. Then I get to start learning when to use my cooldowns.

Weekly Affix Advice

Jdotb also has provided some advice on which dungeons to run or avoid for this week's affixes of Rinforzo, Atrocità and Tirannia.

Dungeons Most Affected by Bolstering

Blackrook Hold: Several trash packs in Blackrook Hold have mobs with varying amounts of health which makes Rinforzo especially annoying because it's almost guaranteed that one or more of the mobs is going to end up Bolstered with lots of health remaining. Doing this dungeon pack by pack rather than with big pulls slows it down substantially.

Eye of Azshara: The signature pulls in Occhio di Azshara are the crabs and goblins which involve a dozen or more mobs at a time. If the mobs don't get grouped tightly it's very easy to end up with a crab at 40% health and 15 Supporto stacks.

Halls of Valor: Sale del Valore is notable for its dangerous spellcasters -- particularly the Thundercallers -- and those spellcasters also happen to have more health than the mobs around them. It's easy to accidentally Supporto a Thundercaller who proceeds to start one-shotting your party with Dardo Tonante and Tuonassalto.

The Arcway: Who hasn't tried to pull the entire spider room and ended up with a Manafang Devourer with more health than Nal'tira? A Bolstered Withered Fiend can easily start handing out naps with Esilio Arcano, and high health Avvizzito del Mana Spettrales are often grouped with those Fiends making it hard not to Supportos the Manawraiths. Rats and Mana Wyrms round out the reasons this dungeon can quickly get out of hand with Rinforzo.

Seat of the Triumvirate: There aren't necessarily any packs that are notably dangerous for Rinforzo in this dungeon, rather it's the layout of the dungeon itself that makes Rinforzo an issue. It's far too easy to pull trash in Seat by accidentally wandering into a mob's aggro radius, and you can end up in combat with three packs at once in the blink of an eye.

Lower Karazhan: Lower Karazhan has too many big pull opportunities in it for Rinforzo not to rear its ugly head a few time. The timer in Lower Karazhan is very forgiving so you can take it slow on Rinforzo and pull smaller, but it makes the dungeon very tedious, and Lower Kara punishes you with the length of the run back if you wipe.

Dungeons Most Affected by Grievous

Cathedral of Eternal Night: Agronox and Mephistroph are both fights that feature continuous group damage. Your party members will be triggering Atrocità throughout the duration of both boss fights which will be an enormous drain on your mana and probably force some healing cooldowns earlier than you'd like to use them.

Lower Karazhan: Moroes might be the boss most affected by Atrocità in all of M+. Garrota will constantly proc Atrocità, and if Atrocità reaches five stacks it can be nearly impossible when combined with Garrota to heal off of someone without cooldowns. Healers will need mana trinkets for this marathon.

Seat of the Triumvirate: Zuraal gets a surprise twist on Atrocità because whoever gets Sfasamento Ombroso will not only have to deal with the usual damage from that stage but also have to heal themselves through Atrocità without any healer support. Good luck. L'ura is already a taxing fight on healer mana pools because of its length; adding Atrocità into the mix is almost unfair.

Upper Karazhan: There isn't much trash in Upper Karazhan to worry about Rinforzo other than the Mana Wyrms, and even in that room your spawn point is probably 20 yards away from you so won't lose much time if you Supporto a few wyrms and decide to intentionally wipe to reset them. Atrocità can be an issue at times on Medivh but you'll have time to catch up on it between phases.

MDI Time Trial Keystones Revealed

Players who have completed the Proving Grounds stage have until Friday, March 16 at 3:00 PM PDT to submit their team to Blizzard using this sign up form. Blizzard has now provided more details about the Time Trials which will start on Tuesday, March 27.

The Time Trials will take place on Tournament Realms with normalized gear and teams will have unlimited tries to achieve the fastest times. 3 dungeons will need to be completed and the times of all 3 will be added together.

Blizzard

Everything You Need to Know About MDI Time TrialsFor last year’s first Mythic Dungeon Invitational, only the top 8 teams were invited to take part in the next stage. This year, we’re allowing even more teams to compete for their share of the $200,000 global prize pool. All eligible teams who complete the MDI Proving Grounds will receive an invitation to the Tournament Realms, which are specifically configured realms for the next stage of the tournament. All players will have access to the same top-end gear to equip their character and prove that they have what it takes to be crowned as the global Mythic Dungeon Invitational champions.What are the Time Trials?Kicking off Tuesday, March 27, the Time Trials is a way for us to judge the overall skill, expertise, and flexibility of teams as they tackle three dungeons across different difficulties. Some teams are good at pushing high keys, or surviving nasty affixes, or maybe they’ve mastered a single dungeon. But in the MDI, teams need to have all these skills to thrive and make it to the top.Dungeon 1Maw of Souls +20EsplosioneSismaPotenziamento

Dungeon 3Neltharion's Lair +24Rosso SangueAtrocitàPotenziamentoThese three dungeons will be the sole focus for teams during the week of Time Trials and all teams will have unlimited tries on the Tournament Realm to refine and master these dungeons.Just completing the dungeons in time won’t be enough and teams will need to push themselves to see how fast they can run each of the dungeons. We’ll compile each team’s fastest time on each dungeon and add all three times together for their Time Trials score. Only the top 8 scores for each region move onto the Regional Bracket stage, so expect teams to be fiercely competitive to stay on top of the pack.Make sure you submit your scores from the Proving Grounds period. All entries must be received by March 16 by 3:00 p.m. PDT. Only dungeons completed during the Proving Ground period will be considered.Keep on top of all the latest news on our new MDI hub!

Commenti

Commento di Freerunz

Commento di MindGames96

on 2018-03-13T16:17:00-05:00

Thanks sloot for pointing out the errors in the post

Commento di livie

on 2018-03-13T17:33:33-05:00

These are great, thanks for answering my questions JB!

The Weekly Affix Advice is especially useful! What could also be helpful is (for Tyrannical weeks especially) to mention which dungeon's Boss/Trash are most affected by Bolstering/Tyrannical. These lists may get redundant but it's good reference material.

Commento di Grortraugh

on 2018-03-13T17:56:42-05:00

Upper Kara Explosive+Tyr is hell on the last boss

Commento di perculia

on 2018-03-13T17:57:18-05:00

These are great, thanks for answering my questions JB!

The Weekly Affix Advice is especially useful! What could also be helpful is (for Tyrannical weeks especially) to mention which dungeon's Boss/Trash are most affected by Bolstering/Tyrannical. These lists may get redundant but it's good reference material.

That's a great suggestion! I've passed it onto Darrie.

Commento di serhatald

on 2018-03-14T01:17:16-05:00

These are great, thanks for answering my questions JB!

The Weekly Affix Advice is especially useful! What could also be helpful is (for Tyrannical weeks especially) to mention which dungeon's Boss/Trash are most affected by Bolstering/Tyrannical. These lists may get redundant but it's good reference material.

That's a great suggestion! I've passed it onto Darrie.

These suggestions can even be featured in the "Today in Broken Isles" section. The mythic progression section is pretty much useless right now.

Commento di perculia

on 2018-03-14T02:33:03-05:00

These are great, thanks for answering my questions JB!

The Weekly Affix Advice is especially useful! What could also be helpful is (for Tyrannical weeks especially) to mention which dungeon's Boss/Trash are most affected by Bolstering/Tyrannical. These lists may get redundant but it's good reference material.

That's a great suggestion! I've passed it onto Darrie.

These suggestions can even be featured in the "Today in Broken Isles" section. The mythic progression section is pretty much useless right now.

I'm not sure from a UI perspective they'd fit in a nice graphic (seems a mini-essay like an article is better) but there are plans to rework parts of Today in Broken Isles including Mythic Progression, consolidating the towers, and adding some tracking like what dailies are up that give you tokens for Allied Race unlocks. It just requires the devs to do it, so it requires more time to do than some other parts of the site.

Commento di serhatald

on 2018-03-14T03:01:40-05:00

These are great, thanks for answering my questions JB!

The Weekly Affix Advice is especially useful! What could also be helpful is (for Tyrannical weeks especially) to mention which dungeon's Boss/Trash are most affected by Bolstering/Tyrannical. These lists may get redundant but it's good reference material.

That's a great suggestion! I've passed it onto Darrie.

These suggestions can even be featured in the "Today in Broken Isles" section. The mythic progression section is pretty much useless right now.

I'm not sure from a UI perspective they'd fit in a nice graphic (seems a mini-essay like an article is better) but there are plans to rework parts of Today in Broken Isles including Mythic Progression, consolidating the towers, and adding some tracking like what dailies are up that give you tokens for Allied Race unlocks. It just requires the devs to do it, so it requires more time to do than some other parts of the site.

Even a link to the article like "Weekly M+ Suggestions" would work fine in my opinion. The visibility of these articles will be lost every week with new datamined stuff, hotfixes etc. The affix rotation is fixed, so this work needs to be done once and then you can just cycle the posts while affix rotation is happening.